Touch Screen Tactile Enhancements

The training of Navy sailors on the conduct of routine and abnormal evolutions is an important element of maintaining operational fleet readiness. Traditional simulator training, especially for seated panel operators inside of a control room, has utilized physical panels that simulate the real hardware panels with respect to appearance, panel response, sound, and tactile feedback. The exterior of the panels resembles the reference plant and includes a mixture of 2 or more position switches, push buttons, and rheostats for input and various digital and analog output devices.  The interior of the panels is not prototypic and instead primarily contains programmable logic controllers that connect the panel’s hardware interfaces with remotely networked simulation computers. Though much less expensive than the actual reference plant panels, physical panels used for training are still costly, require maintenance, and encounter issues due to availability and obsolescence of parts. These costs have increased significantly over the past several years. 

More recently, large touch screens that mimic a physical panel’s appearance, provide prototypic plant indications including sounds, and enable component manipulations via touch screen gestures have been introduced for training. Touch screen-based panels are much less expensive to build and maintain than their physical counterparts.  One set of touch screen panels can even be used to interface with different reference platforms. The primary disadvantage of touch screen-based panels compared with physical panels is the lack of tactile feedback and muscle memory that can be acquired with physical hardware component manipulations. Additional challenges arise when the user needs to manipulate components on one surface of a panel while viewing the results of their manipulations on another face of the panel, leading to drift in finger/hand placement.

Examples of technologies that could improve the tactile feedback of touch screen-based panel trainers include:
•    OnGlass Controls
•    Electroadhesion
•    Linear haptic actuators
•    Piezo elements
•    Touchplates

Information is being sought on technologies that would result in improved tactile feedback over that obtained from touch screen-based component manipulations alone, while still benefitting from the reduced upfront and lifecycle costs compared with physical panels. An ideal technology would be reconfigurable to allow a given touch screen panel to represent different panel variations, function reliably, and require minimal time and effort to switch between different configurations.